As broadcast having High Definition (HD) resolution is extended and served nationwide and worldwide, many users are being accustomed to video having high resolution and high SNR. Accordingly, a lot of organizations have conducted many attempts to develop the next-generation video devices. Furthermore, as there is a growing interest in Ultra High Definition (UHD) having resolution 4 times higher than HDTV along with HDTV, there is a need for technology in which an video having higher resolution and higher SNR is compressed and processed.
In order to compress an video, inter-prediction technology in which a value of a pixel included in a current picture is predicted from temporally anterior and/or posterior pictures, intra-prediction technology in which a value of a pixel included in a current picture is predicted using information about a pixel included in the current picture, entropy encoding technology in which a short code is assigned to a symbol having high frequency of appearance and a long code is assigned to a symbol having low frequency of appearance, etc. can be used.
Video compression technology includes technology in which a specific network bandwidth is provided under the limited operating environment of hardware without taking a flexible network environment into consideration. However, in order to compress video data applied to a network environment including a frequently varying bandwidth, new compression technology is necessary. To this end, a scalable video encoding/decoding method can be used.